Doesn't seem like the funding secured thing was an outright lie.
Therefore, "funding secured" was absolutely an outright lie, unless words don't have meaning anymore.
I still think what he’s done at SpaceX and Tesla is admirable, but after reading those emails I’m definitely a few percent less confident that there will still be a Tesla to service my Model 3 in the future.
And actually he's not a "businessman" at all. He's an engineer at heart. "Businessman" would require strong social skills, not something someone with aspergers has good ability at.
He has not built anything.
Also, his official title at SpaceX is "Chief Engineer" [0]
Selling a startup is not an engineering achievment but a business achievment.
> Also, his official title at SpaceX is "Chief Engineer"
Owning a company means you can give yourself whatever titles you want.
So your entire argument seems to boil down to "he wrote code for Zip2", which happened a quarter of a century ago.
EDIT: And they think they are Musk as well. Without the same ability to raise money that's incredible dangerous so.
Isn't that a little mean, and elitist?
No person is perfect. And Elon Musk certainly has flaws. But saying he's not built anything about someone playing a crucial role in 3+ huge companies just feels wrong.
If we compare him to the CEO's of the other Fortune 50 companies, he seems like one of the most engineering-minded.
I'm not saying he's never written a line of code. I'm saying he's vastly exaggerating his contributions to the technologies he is known for and his only "engineering" credentials are unspecified contributions to a dot com boom software company that repurposed an existing navigation database for its USP while essentially selling web listings to companies.
When people hear Musk is an "engineer" I doubt they're thinking of someone probably just writing some HTML2.0 pages and CGI Perl scripts, if that. It's also important to keep in mind that the history of Zip2 is scantly documented beyond "the brothers Musk founded it and then sold it for millions some years later" so we don't even know if Elon wrote even a single line of code or whether he meaningfully contributed to the software at all.
Even if we're exceptionally credulous and believe he wrote all of Zip2 himself, that makes him a programmer, not an engineer in the sense it is implied when talking about his involvement in Tesla or SpaceX. Knowing how to build physical machines is very different from knowing how to write software, and I say that as a seasoned software dev.
> "Businessman" would require strong social skills, not something someone with aspergers has good ability at.
This exact nonsense is why the autistic community was so displeased when he made a big show of having "asperger's" (which in the US under DSM-V is just autism, btw). Can we please stop justifying toxic and reckless behavior with "oh but they're autistic" as if we're talking about naive children not grown adults?
Autistics tend to struggle with ambiguity and social cues, yes, but many of us are even more sensitive to social cues than allistics because we literally had to learn to pick up on this shit to survive. A lot of autistics report actually being hyper-empathetic to the point where it can be debilitating because it's hard to filter out the noise and determine which cues you're supposed to pick up on and which ones you're supposed to ignore.
Elon Musk is a dickhead AND autistic. He's not a dickhead because he's autistic. He's naive because he got extremely lucky (like all billionaires do, even if it's only winning the lottery of being born into wealthy families with ample of business opportunities) and overestimates his own intelligence (which isn't helped by his massive fanbase thinking he's the best thing since sliced bread because he bought and funded some companies developing tech he thought was cool), not because he's autistic.
There's no such thing as "the autistic community" (though I won't deny some people may self-proclaim themselves as part of some non-existent community) and I'm not justifying anything by what I said. It's just how he thinks.
And I, as an autist, am telling you that this is a farcical caricature that is routinely used to excuse shitty behavior and at the same time deny us autonomy.
You just called the most successful businessman in the world an 'utterly inept businessman'.
Literally the wealthiest person in the world and all achieved through business success!
Defined and successfully delivering on multiple new markets, with a string of serial successes.
And in all the successful cases he had massive contributions by others. He provided the money, which is huge in itself. The actual work eas done by others, and the fact the Musk fails to properly say so, and that his fanboys believe every single of his claims, truely makes him the Steve Jobs of 2020s we deserve.
This is not true. He often mentions and emphasizes that the success is the work of his great teams. He also publicly acknowledged that he failed to do so in the past, but he is certainly doing it now.
Yes and yes
>The actual work eas done by others, and the fact the Musk fails to properly say so,
Give me one instance where Musk denies the work of his friends and colleagues at SpaceX and Tesla please, because this post reek of bad sentiment and an awful take.
Because if you had ever watched a full, unedited interview with him you’d be too embarrassed to post what you just did. He’s a pretty humble guy.
One of the best interviews with him was the one he did with the Babylon Bee - you should watch it; it’s up on Youtube.
Boeing probably has more and better engineers than SpaceX. Same with Toyota/Volkswagen compared to Tesla. Yet these companies simply cannot innovate. Talent (ability to do good work) is pointless without good leadership.
> the fact the Musk fails to properly say so
This is a lie.
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/15170727534756003...
> The failures are mine, the successes belong to others
It is a different kind of innovation so, only considering "disruptuon" as innovation is quite short sighted so. Espiecially since Christensen himself differentiates between disruptive and sustaining (?) innovation.
GM had a pretty good EV in the 80’s - then killed it. Literally - never sold them, only leased them and forced owners to cough them back up and destroyed them.
I have zero interest in owning a Tesla - their stance on right to repair and their customer service sucks, but without them there wouldn’t be near the activity around EVs as there is now. Like him or not, Elon pretty much single handedly embarrassed the rest of the auto industry to have to take EVs seriously by proving that yes, EVs can be not only useful but cool.
And VW and others would care about EVs because of the general awareness about climate change.
Success is measured using market share not market cap or net worth of the CEO.
Tesla accounted for 1.3% of all cars sold in the world during 2021.
Stock price, net worth and number of synchopants getting on their knees are like a voting machine, market share is a weighting machine.
When you use the right metric it becomes crystal clear who are te guys setting records at the weighting machine.
It's the usual quiet ones: Buffett, Gates, Brin&Page, Tim Cook.
Not to mention the GOAT. Rockefeller left Standard Oil at #1 in market share and here we are in 2022 the companies which were under the umbrella of Standard Oil are still at #1.
Your measure of market share is a reasonable one, as are the two I proposed being profit and creating and succeeding in entirely new markets.
They are new markets too, it's not rockets, it's reusable rockets at incredibly lower cost to orbit and new capacities to previous ones, it's space based communication networks that are again a serious generational leap ahead of whatever was before, it's the emergence of a serious replacement for ICE vehicles. In all these markets, his companies are the only market share! He owns these markets, because he created them, and is multiple years ahead of the rest of the world's highly motivated competitors.
I'm not detracting from the successes of the other guys you mentioned. But Musk can very reasonably be called the world's most successful businessman at the moment on multiple metrics.
It might be a competition between Musk and others, but it's the opposite utterly inept, which was the point - trying to give the benefit of the doubt to the OP per HN guidelines, while also keeping the discussion grounded in rational sanity.
All the stuff you mentioned brings zero benefits to the consumer. The consumer wants a steady improvement in their quality of life in the next 3 months or less, and then you go from there hopefully adding one more bit in the next 3 months and so on.
There is a reason why Musk BS doesn't find fertile ground in NYC and his cult is largely based in California. Quartely (4 * 3 = 12) reports were adopted because people want to have a clear understanding of how a public company is improving the American consumer's quality of life, and they want it every 3 months.
Tesla accounted for 1.3% of all cars sold in the world in 2021, these are rich people toys we are talking about. 1.3% in 20 years.
> He owns these markets, because he created them
Cars are cars, EV, hybrid, gasoline, diesel...whatever. If you are in the business of making cars the relevance of your company should be judged based on what's you market share in car manufacturing compared against everybody who are also in the business of making cars.
Mr. Musk took 20 years to get to 1.3%. That's 80 Quarters. 1.3% / 80 = 0.01625% per quarter. What are we even talking about...
By this time around the govt. was already threatning Gates and Rockefeller to put them in jail because they had 95% market share of Operative Systems and oil respectively.
You can just compare the current situation.
This time, he got letters from people with money saying he can have it, and on what basis. Now that we see it, isn't it obvious that is what "funding secured" means, even if we don't all know exactly how high finance works?
"Funding secured" wasn't a half-truth, it was an outright lie that sounded a little like a half truth. Very Trumpian.
Also, it's recently been reported that a judge declared the question of whether "funding secured" was a knowing lie closed, in the sense that the jury in related ongoing litigation will be told that it's not up to them to decide that point.
Musk has never admired to having made up the funding. He settled the dispute because it lead to problems with Tesla credit rating, banks didn't want an outstanding dispute with SEC.
He says he did have funding secured. He elaborated on the details in the recent TED talk.
Do you have any privileged information about the incident or are you just casually calling someone a liar based on third-hand news you read online?
So, no, informed people are not "casually" calling him a liar.
I sincerely doubt that. Judges don’t tend to talk that way, regardless of the case at hand.
>I sincerely doubt that. Judges don’t tend to talk that way, regardless of the case at hand.
GP is probably refering to this (in which case you are right, judge didn't use words like liar)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/04/judge-in-musk-tr...
"Judge in Musk trial will tell jury that “Funding secured” tweets were false"
and
"[T]hough 'jury instructions are often an ineffective remedy,' the Court finds that unlikely to be true for the instant case where the jury will be told that the Court has already found that the August 2018 tweets were false and made with the requisite scienter [knowledge of wrongdoing]," Chen wrote.
Those are words like liar.
Even though there's a bunch of people (including Carmack) that claim that he's a great engineer, it's really hard to believe when he's put out stuff like this. Like, did he use up all of his thinking fuel on designing rockets that he didn't understand why the boring company's mission was a total non-starter?
> it's really hard to believe when he's put out stuff like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw?t=122
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA8ZBJWo73E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zlnbs-NBUI
This is how Musk actually talks.
> Like, did he use up all of his thinking fuel on designing rockets that he didn't understand why the boring company's mission was a total non-starter?
He doesn't spend a lot of time working on the boring company to be frank. It's a small side project. He's doing it to see if it's possible.
The fundamental point of boring company is to reduce the cost of underground boring. Shoving cars through tunnels is a means to an end of reducing the cost of underground boring. It's about finding a path to make some kind, any kind, of money off of boring in order to make the product development costs self-feeding. This is why the idea of cars driving through the tunnels was done rather than the original idea of putting cars on platforms through the tunnels. Cheaper and faster to market.
Musk started boring company with the idea that transportation needs to be 3 dimensional, and not just adding another single layer of transport under the ground (trains/subways), but having a whole ton of layers going deeper and deeper into the ground. Now they've done their first iteration of tunnel, which is quite bad, rinse and repeat until it gets cheaper.
BTW, Musk has never come out against subways, his point was just that in the US, people drive into cities in cars, so if they're using cars, then the transport system in the city needs to handle cars in a three dimensional way.
Moving transportation underground is such revolutionary idea that it exists for a century by now.
1. He wants to move roads to 3d just like computer chips are 3d. This should increase bandwidth.
2. He wants to packet switch the system instead of batch. This should lower latency.
3. For the first two to work, you need to greatly reduce the cost/speed to construct them. Think Moore's law.
4. One way to do this is to speed up the boring machines.
5. Another way is to lower the additional necessary equipment. Tunnels carrying internal combustion cars need air circulation lest people die from carbon monoxide poisoning/ lack of oxygen. EVs don't need that.
6. Smaller tunnels are much faster to construct so constructing one for a subway would be much slower than one for EVs.
Arguments against this can either attack the premise that cities are necessary (remote work), that bigger cities are necessary (why not have smaller cities), that existing or other transportation can handle it better, or one or more of the above chains of thought are flawed.
This line of thinking is also found in his latest factories where the line is just a line of cars moved by carriers that aren't physically anchored to the floor). He makes an analogy of factories as computer chips.
At most there are memory chips with just a few layers
Maybe not as much, but you’re still gonna need air circulation
You ignored the essential part of his well written and detailed explanation - its not about the fact that its underground, but the cost of creating underground pathways, for cars or whatever. It saddens me that bad posts like yours infect HN.
Or his proven track record of creating groundbreaking companies such as SpaceX and Tesla, which has made him the worlds richest man and why we are talking about him right now? Jeez
Who knows how we'll solve transport in the future? Maybe we'll all be in personal cars underground and any massive investments in rail will be for nothing?
It's a variant of the general idea of pushing things like elevated monorails that you know are so expensive they won't be built in the near future. Or, indeed, very low pressure tube transportation systems.
Car companies have done this type of lobbying work since forever. Just as the oil companies when they push for more production, but since all oil will be biofuel in the future, in the end it will be a net positive for the environment.